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Rob Birnholz and Ian Robinson, contributing authors to Motion Graphics with Adobe Creative Suite 5 Studio Techniques, take a break to discuss their top five favorite new features of Adobe After Effects CS5. Whether you use After Effects for hard-core compositing or you’re a designer looking to push your projects to the next level, there’s something new for everyone.

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3. New Color Correction Effects

You may recognize the new effects -- Vibrance and Black and White -- from Photoshop and Lightroom. This may seem like a small addition to After Effects, but we think you’ll find it amazingly helpful. You’ll find many more options added to your creative toolkit, as well as much more precise control over your image adjustments. The Vibrance control is similar to Saturation, except it analyzes your footage as you make adjustments, understanding exactly when values need to clipped to avoid looking ugly and out of control. Colors can be vividly enhanced without adding significant noise or distortion to an image. This tool will certainly be used a lot when looking to punch up a shot's color density.

The new Black and White filter also adds control far beyond the standard method of reducing saturation to zero. Anyone who's used Camera Raw will recognize -- and instantly appreciate -- the difference. Instead of just desaturating the image as a whole, this filter has sliders to allow you to individually adjust the luminance of five different color channels: Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues and Magentas. Adjusting these values can make for a totally different look than anything you could achieve in the past with the old standby Hue and Saturation. In addition to the channel sliders, the B&W filter also has a "tint" option, making it a fine alternative to the standard Tint filter that's been around for years, again giving you more precise control through multiple channels rather than just affecting the image as a whole.

Now, for you diehard color correction artists, the plugin from Synthetic Aperture has been updated to Color Finesse 3 LE. With Color Finesse you can apply your primary and secondary color corrections with more control and now save out your settings as LUT’s, (color lookup tables) for use in other projects. This allows you build a library of your favorite color correction settings and even distribute those exact settings for use on other systems.